(and people really used VB to death for a lot of projects; some good, some bad) - but the stigma (which is unfounded with today's languages) remains
I dunno. I have heard that there is a very large amount of commercially sold software that is written in Visual Basic. The computer scientists may still be sneering, but the real world tends to use whatever gets the job done. (thus the success of C, as well. For better and worse.)